So we're sitting down at the bar listening to Cryptorchid Chipmunk, which is easily one of the more entertaining bands that plays at Pleasant Street. (Note that I do not mean they are great music, no offense CC, but they are damn entertaining.) This is the type of band that has a song about how fun it is to say the word fuck, which dissolves into a lovely rhythmic refrain of just the word itself... They also always dress up amusingly (and often scantily). This particular evening one of the female members of the group was wearing Superman underoos--the other female member was dressed as a hamburger. My favorite time was when all of the members, even the three guys, wore lace negligees on stage. Let me tell you, those are some seriously gutsy skinny white boys...

Anyway, there's a guy there, younger than I, who happens to have brought up something in passing about ghosts. But what should mine ear catch? Why, the name of a cemetery very near where I grew up, and where an elementary school friend of mine is buried... Pleasant Hill Cemetery, though he does not call it this, he mentions that it is the cemetery over on Pierpont Road...

So I ask him about it. And while his own ghost story is an innocent one (strange lights at night, and strange light areas in some photos that were taken in daylight the next day which correspond with the previously seen strange lights) it makes me wonder about the strangely creepy feeling I often felt driving by the place at night, and all the times I was sure there was something on the side of the road there by the cemetery until I looked directly and saw nothing... To the point of sudden breaking because I thought something was about to move into the road... And it has quite thoroughly spooked me on the matter. (And no, I really don't think it was just the influence of being near a cemetery, since the cemetary is actually set up away from the road and it had never occurred to me before this that THAT was the spot in the road where these strange things always happened...)

But this sparked some further conversation about spooky things in the Morgantown area, and ghosts in general. (And while I'm not clear on whether or not I believe in ghosts per se, I believe that there are spooky and strange things which happen for some reason--and that it makes for some very interesting stories.) Let me start with my own tale, which is relatively unremarkable, and then another friend's, and then some other tales and bits of tales...

I often think that the trailer I lived in in my younger days had something odd about it. But then again, it is a trailer, and prone to strange sighs and groans with the cooling night temperatures, and the click-whir of the furnace coming on at night (which would make me jump, but was comforting white noise which made me feel I could shift under the sheets without the monsters hearing me). When I was in the third grade my parents bought several acres of property, to which the trailer was moved, and by the time I was in the seventh grade we had moved into a house on the property and out of the trailer.

My story is from the between time, when the trailer was still there, with curtains in the windows but all of the furniture moved, and we were living in the house on top of the hill. And as I walked down to catch the bus in the pre-dawn dimness, I noticed that at the end of the trailer, in what was once my room, there was a light on. The light was low in the room, like a table lamp turned on, and I could see it shining a rather whitish light again the curtains.

Should I repeat that there was no furniture in the house? That all that was left behind were odds and ends of boxes and toys...but certainly no table or lamp. And while it should have given me a rather creepy feeling, as it does in retrospect, it didn't even occur to me at the time to be concerned? That I was late and running for the bus and witnessed this oddity and moved on without even telling my parents about it for years?

Maybe not a ghost story at all, that. But I tend to think of it as one.

A friend of mine had a tale I don't feel right about sharing in detail, as it isn't mine to tell, but he lived in a house where someone had suicided. And one day, when he was home alone because he was sick, he heard noises coming from the room where the suicide occurred. So he went to check, but there was nothing. But when he left and went back to watching tv, he heard the noises again. Went to check. Still nothing. Finally, when he went to watching tv again, the noises started again. And all he could do was turn up the tv and do his best to ignore it.

And the most creepy thing to me about this? The thought that these weren't things being done for us. That when my friend went to check nothing was happening, but something obviously was when he was away from the scene. That these things go on anyway, and that we happen to catch a glimpse of it, but it has nothing really to do with us. That's creepy.

So this guy at the bar, he has a friend who was interested in ghost-hunting. So he had investigated most of the supposedly haunted places in the Morgantown area. According to him there is a place nearby known as Hell's Hollow. You go out toward the Morgantown Mall and keep driving out that road. There's a small town out there, the name of which he couldn't remember, but he said there was a bar beside the road and a power plant (this isn't uncommon in this area). He said that when he and his friend went out there they stopped at the bar for directions, and then took his friend's Jeep down into the woods, over the old dirt road into the hollow. There was a settlement there in the woods in the 1930's, that was abandoned when a number of residents were inexplicably mutilated. The homes are no longer there, but you can still see the foundations, and he said that they left the strangest things behind, like shoes on the side of the road, and a tricycle left right in the middle of the road. And while he didn't see anything himself, he says that the woods made the hair on his neck stand up, and that there were strange sounds in the wooded areas around them.

When I told Sean about this he mentioned a place he and some of his friends used to drive out to years ago to sit and drink, way out River Road. He said it looked like the spot of an old lock and dam--that you could see the slab going out into the river, and the foundations of homes that used to be there, but that there was nothing there now... I might get him to take me out to try to find it again--I don't know if I quite have the guts to investigate the Hell's Hollow tale, but this other place might be interesting to see too.

The guy also told me a tale about two girls who were hitch-hiking along 857, going out toward Rich's Farms. Apparently, (he said I could look it up, though obviously I've done no double-checking on anything I'm mentioning here) these two girls were found dead in the woods weeks later, headless. And that there have been an uncanny number of accidents on the road since, many caused by people trying to avoid things which weren't really there (though having driven this road, I can see the accidents being caused as much by the twisty road as by anything supernatural). This one reminded me of a story I remember hearing about out by the Winery, since there are a number of mine shafts running under the ground there, there was some murderer who stayed in some cave/mine opening out that way, and it seems to me that story involved girls and decapitation as well, though I'll have to ask Ivy about it. Is that maybe just a popular urban myth?

There's also that very creepy patch of woodland above the South Park area, where several odd things have happened. It's a sort of twisted and dark bit of woodland that has somehow survived in the heart of urban developement--there's a Dairy Mart (think Quick Stop, non-area readers) which sits right beside the area, and a large tower (cell tower maybe), and homes along one side...but there are always dead animals near it, and it seems to distort noises at night, so much that there are a number of odd stories about the area, and sometimes about the homes near that area.

Of course every town has odd stories (like the one about the strange water creature that some people think might have been a giant snapping turtle, which apparently snagged a horse and rider, I think in the late 1800's, and drug them into the Cheat River?) but they are certainly interesting to collect and share...

And with those shared I'm going to go to bed now, and completely fail to sleep...